Would Current Ad Hoc Routing Protocols be Adequate for the Internet of Vehicles? A Comparative Study

In recent years we have seen a great proliferation of smart vehicles, ranging from cars to little drones (both terrestrial and aerial), all endowed with sensors and communication capabilities. It is hence easy to foresee a future with even more smart and connected vehicles moving around, occupying space and creating an Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In this IoV, a multitude of nodes (both static and mobile) will generate a continuous multihop flow of local information to support local smart environment applications. Therefore, one interesting environment for the IoV would be in the form of 3-D mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Unfortunately, MANET routing protocols have generally been designed and analyzed keeping in mind a 2-D scenario; there is no guarantee on how they would support a 3-D topology of the IoV. To this end, we have considered routing protocols deemed as the state-of-the-art for classic MANETs and tested them over 3-D topologies to evaluate their assets and technical challenges

Dynamic context adaptation in multimedia documents

ABSTRACT Multimedia documents are collections of media objects, synchronized by means of sets of temporal and spatial constraints. Any multimedia document definition is valid as long as the referred media objects are available and the constraints are satisfiable. Document validity depends on the context in which the document has to be presented. In this paper, we introduce a framework to characterize context adaptation, in the presence of both physical and user oriented context requirements. We define semantically equivalent presentation fragments as alternative to undeliverable ones. In the absence of equivalence, undeliverable media are replaced with candidates that minimize the loss of information/quality in the presentation

May SmartPhones Help to Maintain Audience Attention During Presentations?

In this paper we describe a new tool for interactive presentations: the speaker shows a common slideshow on the screen, and the users can see the same slide in their smartphone or tablet, independently from its model and brand. The system can be used for both on-line and on-site presentations and encourages the user to perform social activities, e. g., comment or like a slide. The author can also submit a questionnaire or a poll to the audience and see in real-time the answers. Our tool has been used during 37 different events, followed by 3753 users. We recorded the actions of the users and, depending on the different kind of events, the average of actions ranges from 1 to 8 per user per presentation. This data shows that our tool helps to increase users engagement and to maintain user attention

s-CRIq: the online short version of the Cognitive Reserve Index Questionnaire

Background: The wide use of the term Cognitive Reserve (CR) is in need of a clear and shared definition of its concept and of the development of new tools, quick and easy to use and updated for the people of today. This study describes the online short CRIq (s-CRIq), the new shorter version of the CRIq, following an item analysis revision, and compares the data distribution of different samples. Methods: The s-CRIq was administered online to 435 people while another 440 filled out the s-CRIq in self-administration. A further 588 participants had been administered the original paper-and-pencil long CRIq and 344 the online long CRIq. Results: The major difference in the databases of s-CRIq versus the long versions is an increased score in education and in leisure activity. However, the density distributions of the total score of CRI in the 4 databases share 64% of their areas, and at least two of them share 84%. Conclusion: The s-CRIq proved to be a simple and easy-to-administer tool. Similarly, to the original version, the s-CRIq is freely available on the web, and it is our hope that it will be of fruitful use for researchers and clinicians alike

Discovering Local Attractions from Geo-Tagged Photos

none1This paper presents PhotoTrip, an interactive online service which is able to recommend not widely known, but interesting, places along travel itineraries, without human intervention. These points of interest are identified by analyzing the geo-tagged pictures contained in Flickr community. PhotoTrip enriches these pictures with information provided by WikiLocations, to enhance the recommended local attractions with additional information on what is depicted in the photos to help the user to make a choice. We evaluated the system with an user study.noneGaggi O.Gaggi, Ombrett

Enhancing Photoware in the Social Networks Environment

This paper presents SMIL PhotoShow, an authoring tool for photo books, which allows the creation of enhanced multimedia presentations, enriched with audio (music or spoken) comments, transition effects and animations in a very simple way. Our tool allows to create a digital counterpart of a printed photo book with the aim to bridge the gap between digital web albums and printed photo books. Since authoring a photo book is a time consuming activity, SMIL PhotoShow provides the users also the possibility to create, with only three clicks, an engaging slideshows with transition effects and background music